A military training academy with a gymnastics club; a scheming president; a lethal and destructive fire — the story of the defunct Kenyon Military Academy (KMA) is one of intrigue. Founded in 1825 by Philander Chase in Worthington, Ohio, and moved to Gambier in 1828, the KMA was a college-preparatory and military training academy for boys that operated until 1906.

The KMA prided itself on a strict regimen accompanied by a rich array of activities. In an 1894 advertisement published in the Collegian, the KMA states its purpose of “providing, west of the Alleghanies, a training school fully equal to the best schools of the East” and describes its structure as “conducted upon a strict Military system, but unlike many of the military schools, decidedly homelike.” The ad boasts “weekly receptions for recreation and social cultivation, occasions of great enjoyment and profit to the cadets,” as well as a “large new gymnasium and drill hall.” The KMA also had athletic teams, which often played against Kenyon College and other schools in Ohio. According to a 1904 Collegian article, its 1903 football team was known as “the team that did not lose a game.” 

The skills of the young pupils at the KMA were not just restricted to physical performance. The school staged a play in 1901 of Bulwer Lytton’s Richelieu and organized a KMA Orchestra, which performed in 1898 with a Collegian review at the time noting, “Although their first appearance in public, they played with all the assurance of old hands and are worthy of much commendation.” 

Most notably, the KMA had a gymnastics club and held popular annual exhibitions open to the public. An 1896 Collegian review of the gymnasium exhibition reported that attendees included “a goodly number of townspeople, students from Kenyon and Bexley” as well as students from Harcourt Place Seminary for Young Ladies and Girls, a preparatory school for girls at the time also located in Gambier. The article reported that “Captain Blackford’s giant swing, backward leap and double horizontal bar performance was excellent” and that during the trapeze performance, “the fairer spectators held their breath until the last leap was safely finished, and then joined enthusiastically in the applause.” 

According to a 1975 Collegian article, enrollment rates at Kenyon College were dropping rapidly in the early 1890s. In order to reconcile this, former College President William Bodine decided that the three institutions in Gambier at the time (Kenyon College, the KMA and Bexley Theological Seminary) should be led under one president. In 1891, Theodore Sterling would take up this position, replacing Bodine and helming the tri-school system. That year, much to Sterling’s dismay, the KMA’s enrollment was “triple that of Kenyon’s, 134 to 43.” 

The disparity in enrollment created much strife between the KMA and Kenyon College. The effectiveness of enrollment efforts at the College started to wane, in part because of “K.M.A instructors [that] discouraged their boys from going to Kenyon.” In fact, a Collegian article from 1975 reports that “[in] years preceding the union at the three institutions the K.M.A. sent only one in every fourteen graduates on to the College, opposed to three or four times that in the past.” In response, Sterling “started taking students out of the Academy and placing them in the College before they had finished the required work either for the K.M.A. or the Kenyon entrance exams.” Sterling’s successor, President William Foster Peirce, would bring a much more amicable relationship between Kenyon and the KMA.

Tragically, on Feb. 24, 1906, a fire broke out in Milnor Hall, one of the KMA’s dormitories, killing three students and injuring many more. The KMA was permanently closed after the fire.

Since the time the KMA marched across Kenyon, the campus has seen presidents come and go, the beginning of coeducation and the construction of countless buildings. Amid all this change, the KMA remains an integral piece of Kenyon’s history. 

The KMA boasted a variety of student groups, including a football team and a gymnastics club, pictured practicing “the elephant.”